Today we left the dock at 10:00 a.m. and transited for about four and a half hours to the deep MRS site at 3000 meters in Monterey Canyon. The Midwater Respirometry System (MRS) is a piece of equipment designed by MBARI engineers and scientists to help us study how midwater animals respire in their natural habitat. The MRS measures temperature and oxygen levels within the eight chambers. Kim Reisenbichler has run respirometer studies on many of the common midwater inhabitants in the lab, but finding out how these animals respire in situ will allow us to better understand their physiology. We deployed the ROV Doc Ricketts and used the MRS to collected four different kinds of jellies.

The comb jelly Lampocteis is sampled by the MRS

When an animal is collected in a sampler, another sampler is closed with no animal in the chamber as a control. Oxygen and temperature levels of the water mass collected in the control chamber without the effects of an animal in the chamber is measured. This measurement will allow Kim to compare the results from the control chamber and the chamber with the collected animal. The chambers also have a stirrer that mixes the water to keep the temperature and oxygen consistent throughout the chamber.

The pilots were able to attach the MRS to the mooring and disconnect the hydraulic lines that are used to open and close the chambers.

MRS hanging on the mooring

Tomorrow, we will collect more animals for other scientists on board, recover the vehicle and retrieve all of our samples then deploy the Doc Ricketts for a second dive so we can retrieve the MRS. Once the MRS is back onboard, Kim will download the temperature and oxygen data and begin analyzing the data.

The R/V Western Flyer is a small water-plane area twin hull (SWATH) oceanographic research vessel measuring 35.6 meters long and 16.2 meters wide. It was designed and constructed for MBARI to serve as the support vessel for ROV operations. Her missions include the Monterey Bay as well as extended cruises to Hawaii, Gulf of California, and the Pacific Northwest.

ROV Doc Ricketts

ROV Doc Ricketts is MBARI's next generation ROV. The system breaks new ground in providing an integrated unmanned submersible research platform, with many powerful features providing efficient, reliable and precise sampling and data collection in a wide range of missions.

Midwater respirometry system (MRS)

The MRS conducts oxygen consumption rate measurements in situ, gauging the metabolism of animals without subjecting them to the stresses of transport to the surface. MRS has been modified to operate in deeper water with an expanded capacity, enabling respiration studies on animals that live deeper than 1250 meters.

Detritus sampler

Detritus samplers are large Plexiglas containers with lids that can be manipulated by the pilot of the ROV and gently closed once an organism is trapped inside.

CTDO

The CTDO is mounted on the ROV and takes in situ measurements of environmental parameters such as conductivity, temperature, depth, and oxygen concentration.

High frequency suction sampler

This sampler acts like a vacuum cleaner sucking up samples and depositing them into one of the 12 buckets.

Research Team

Bruce Robison
Senior Scientist, MBARI

Bruce Robison's research is focused on the biology and ecology of deep-sea animals, particularly those that inhabit the oceanic water column. He pioneered the use of undersea vehicles for these studies and he led the first team of scientists trained as research submersible pilots. At MBARI, his research group has focused on the development of remotely operated vehicles as platforms for deep-sea science. His midwater research program is presently measuring the oxygen consumption rates of deep-living animals, and the ecological impacts of the declining oxygen content of the ocean's midwaters. Instead of bringing animals to the surface for these measurements and subjecting them to decompression, the measurements are made at depth using new instrumentation developed by MBARI's engineers. Related investigations include studies on the ecology, physiology, and behavior of fishes, squid, and a variety of gelatinous animals.

Kim Reisenbichler
Senior Research Technician, MBARI

Kim's general area of interest is the study of midwater and deep sea animals. He has developed many tools and techniques to observe, manipulate, and collect these organisms, and to maintain the animals in the lab.

Rob Sherlock
Senior Research Technician, MBARI

Rob studies the properties and organisms of the ocean's largest habitat, the midwater. His research group is learning more about the ecology of midwater organisms; their abundance and seasonal patterns, depth ranges and who eats whom. Rob enjoys watching mesopelagic animals with the HD (high definition) camera; animals that once would have come up as glop in a net can be seen to have delicate structure and complex behavior (e.g., squid inking or changing color, fish eyes that rotate to keep prey in sight, an amphipod carving up a pyrosome to make a home).

Kris Walz
Research Assistant, MBARI

Kris works with the Midwater Ecology group, analyzing ROV video transects between 50 and 1,000 meters in depth to identify biological organisms from all taxonomic levels, most of which spend their entire lives in the oceanic water column. Kris started working at MBARI in 1996 after finishing her Master's at UC Santa Cruz. She's looking forward to returning to sea this month to collect video transects and search for deep-sea lobster larvae from the family Polychelidae.

Susan von Thun
Research Technician, MBARI

Susan works in the MBARI video lab, where her primary responsibility is to watch video taken with MBARI's remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and make observations about the organisms, behaviors, equipment, and geological features that she sees. While annotating video, she's become adept at identifying numerous deep-sea organisms, specializing in midwater organisms. She works closely with the midwater ecology group and the bioluminescence lab to expand her knowledge of the fish, jellies, cephalopods, and other groups in the midwater.

Henk-Jan Hoving
Postdoctoral Fellow, MBARI

Henk-Jan received his Ph.D in Ocean Ecosystems from the University of Groningen. Henk-Jan has developed an experimental program of both laboratory and in situ research that will chemically mark increments in the deposition of squid statoliths. Using the marks as temporal reference points, the pattern of deposition should allow him to determine the age of any squid.

Karen Osborn
Postdoctoral Fellow,
Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Karen's research interests include evolution of pelagic life, phylogenetics of marine invertebrates, and mechanisms of speciation in the open ocean and the deep sea. Karen is a former MBARI graduate research assistant and is currently a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow at Scripps.

Meghan Powers
Graduate Research Assistant, MBARI

Meghan is a doctoral candidate at UC Santa Cruz in Dr. Steve Haddock's lab. Her research is focused on understanding the molecular biology and evolution of bioluminescence in a variety of deep-sea zooplankton including cephalopods, chaetognaths, and jellyfish.

Sam Urmy
University of Washington

Samuel is a graduate student at the University of Washington. His research uses DEIMOS, a deep-water acoustics package at the MARS observatory on the continental slope in Monterey Bay, California to describe the distribution and density of animals such as krill through the entire water column through time. His aim is to describe changing patterns in this density distribution using a variety of metrics and indicators derived from the raw data, with the aim of gaining a clearer picture of how this system behaves.